Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

This year, the Dallas Morning News has tracked several parts of the Texas budget as a moral responsibility. From their perspective, here's what the Texas House and Senate have done right with their budgets – and what each chamber should accept from the other.

Three Democratic senators – Royce West of Dallas, Eliot Shapleigh of El Paso and Judith Zaffirini of Laredo – filed legislation this week to prohibit colleges from receiving gifts, stocks and other perks from companies that lend money to students.

For the more than 100,000 students in El Paso County who qualify for free or reduced-price breakfasts and lunches, the trays full of food they receive twice a day might be the only balanced meals they see all day. El Paso school cafeterias serve more than 20 million meals a year to a student population that, for the most part, is poor enough to qualify for at least a discounted price.

Gabrielle Barrera attends Bowie High School, a campus that sits in the second-poorest zip code in the city. Alex Newton is a student at Franklin High School, an institution that was built in the 79912 zip code, which has 958 millionaire households, the most of any concentrated area in the El Paso-Las Cruces region.

Justice Department lawyers concluded that the landmark Texas congressional redistricting plan spearheaded by Rep. Tom DeLay (R) violated the Voting Rights Act, according to a previously undisclosed memo obtained by The Washington Post. But senior officials overruled them and approved the plan.

There is a simple formula for getting out of poverty: Get more schooling, then land a better job. But for many struggling parents, none of it is possible without affordable day care.

The consensus is clear: If El Paso is to emerge from the deep cycle of poverty that affects nearly a third of the population, education must play a key role. Local economists, elected officials, business leaders and educators said El Paso's full economic potential won't be reached until more people become better educated.

It’s much too soon to declare the march toward a New Gilded Age over. If history is any guide, one of these days we’ll see the emergence of a New Progressive Era, maybe even a New New Deal. But it may be a long wait.

Border business leaders are pushing hard to get legislation passed that will allow DPS to pilot a program for enhanced high security driver’s licenses. SB 2027, authored by Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, is modeled on pilot program legislation recently enacted in the state of Washington.

In El Paso, where so many of us work daily to emerge from the humblest means, a free and high-quality public education is the only difference between a life of poverty and a life of economic independence.

There is so much amiss with the voter identification bill that passed the House this week, it is hard to know what's most offensive. Senators know these requirements will suppress voting in Texas, and they should see to it that the bills die a quiet death in their chamber.

Four years ago, Texas embarked on the nation's most ambitious plan to privatize enrollment in social services. Today, the project is in shambles. Some are pointing to Gov. Rick Perry's Health and Human Services executive commissioner, Albert Hawkins, who oversaw the projects.

There was a time when many economists believed that post-secondary education didn’t have much impact on economic growth. But lately that assumption has been overturned, and the social rate of return on investment in university education in India has been calculated at an impressive nine or ten per cent.

In El Paso, where 200,000 people live below the poverty line, it costs more to be poor. Strapped for cash, but without good credit or an another alternative, many low-income El Pasoans regularly turn to payday loans. In exchange for the quick emergency cash they need, they also get exorbitant interest rates, which must be repaid, or additional debt, making it even tougher to escape poverty.

With unemployment rates higher than state and national averages and a work force that is often underemployed, El Paso faces the challenge of securing niche markets and creating higher-paying jobs to combat poverty, area educators and city officials say.

As the American-Statesman's Mike Ward showed so poignantly in his Sunday story ("Guards' hurts stir oversight concerns"), we're getting what we pay for at the Texas Youth Commission.

Gov. Rick Perry's staff knew as early as June 2005 that two administrators at a Texas Youth Commission facility were not being prosecuted on claims that they were sexually abusing youths in their custody, according to records obtained Tuesday by the Houston Chronicle.

The Knowledge is Power Program — the much-touted national charter school network born in Houston more than a decade ago — will unveil a $100 million plan today to expand its number of schools here fivefold, creating a system that could rival the Houston Independent School District.

A simmering backroom political dispute about whether Gov. Rick Perry had the authority to appoint a special master in the Texas Youth Commission scandal exploded publicly Monday as a House committee initiated an inquiry to answer growing legal questions.

Do schools really need more money? One way to hold schools accountable for their spending is to post their spending online and let taxpayers examine their monthly expenses.